Heart donations for transplant short of demand

More than 500,000 end-stage heart disease patients need life-saving heart transplants each year in China, but only 200 can receive the surgery, said a national political adviser.

Hu Shengshou, president of the Beijing-based Fuwai Hospital and an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said a huge gap exists between demand and supply for the surgery, citing limited organ donations.

"China leads the world in terms of the survival rate after heart transplantation, however. About 90 percent of recipients live more than five years after the surgery," he told China Daily on Monday on the sidelines of the ongoing two sessions.

A majority of the procedures take place in the large cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Xi'an, he said.

In addition, heart transplants are cheaper than liver or kidney transplants, because of a more orderly practice environment, Hu said.

He added that a national public organ donation system launched in 2009 would facilitate voluntary organ donations after death and ease the severe shortage of organs for transplants.

In the long run, brain dead patients will be the major donors of hearts for transplant, which is in line with international practice, he said.

At present, most organ donations are made after the donor's cardiac death, which made the heart transplant more difficult, he said.

China started heart transplants 10 years after the first in the world and got on a fast development track after the year 2000.